Premier League Highlights: Chelsea v. Reading

For Wednesday’s Premier League highlight, controversy is king yet again. A clearly offside Fernando Torres was allowed to score Chelsea’s third (and winning) goal. Replays were very clear in showing that Torres was certainly in an offside position when the ball was crossed in for him to score. It was another source of contention involving match officials and could spark more calls for video replay.

My biggest concern with this is that referees continue to be allowed to make these mistakes without any real consequences for changing the course of a game (or a season for that matter). Being a match official is a difficult job, but when you are trained to do the job, you should be able to do that job right and accept responsibility if you don’t.

As far as the match itself, Reading did look very good. They were not afraid to go at Chelsea and attack throughout the game. While Chelsea took the lead through a first half penalty, Reading were able to fight back and grab 2 goals to take a 2-1 lead into the half.

The second half saw more attacking from Reading and they did well to keep Chelsea on the back foot. This continued until Gary Cahill put in Chelsea’s 2nd goal as a result of goalkeeper Federici’s error.

Chelsea’s winning goal was unfairly given by the assistant. It was a terrible call that completely changed the shape of the game from that point. If that call was correctly made Federici would not have been up for Reading’s last corner and their goal would not have been empty for Chelsea to get their fourth goal of the match.

I suppose the element of human error does make the game interesting, it is just very disappointing when a mistake made changes the outcome of a game so completely.